Let’s Stop the New Teenage Mom Craze

What’s fueling the uptick? Abstinence-only education is one suspect, says John Santelli, M.D., chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health at Columbia University. His new study found that teens are having as much sex as before, but there has been a 10 percent drop in the use of contraception, “partly because abstinence-only programs emphasize condom failure.”

But the fact that we’ve started to glamorize teen pregnancy may be just as influential. “Some teens mistakenly think that being a young, single mom is cool,” says Sarah Brown, CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “But typical teen mothers don’t wind up in Star magazine.” Instead, fewer than 2 percent graduate college before age 30, 8 of 10 teen fathers don’t marry their kids’ teen mothers, and two thirds of the children born into such situations are poor.

Reversing the rise in teen pregnancy in this country starts with a more honest conversation about sex, and real information about birth control, says
Martha Kempner, vice president of commu-nications at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Most important, she says, “we should focus not only on sex but also on talking to young girls about self-esteem and their dreams for the future.” Brown agrees: “Programs and federal money can only do so much to teach young women these fundamental things. We need to start thinking in-depth about what it means to start a family. Sit down and have that conversation with a teen close to you.”